ABSTRACT
This was the first Gay Games to be held in the Southern Hemisphere, in a city most well-known for its spectacular harbour, coat hanger bridge, Opera House shaped to set sail and the largest hallmark event in Australia; the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Broadcast on national television and watched live by up to 500,000 spectators, this parade of fabulous, irreverent, political and community-based floats, massed performances, and individuals, is a celebration of LGBTIQ sexuality, identity and community activism, politics as a party, followed by the big dance party. Australia is also renown for being a sports crazy nation, producing a plethora of world champion teams and individuals in all sorts of sport, and being one of only three nations to have been represented at every Olympic Games (Cashman 1995: 205-8). The millennium Olympic Games demonstrated Sydney’s organisational, technological, commercial and sporting capabilities as well as the Australian peoples’ abiding passion for sport and big events. Emulating this dedication to sport and events, the sports organisation representing the gay and lesbian community of Sydney – Team Sydney – had been involved in the Gay Games and the FGG since their respective beginnings. Team Sydney highlighted these strengths in a bid to stage the sixth Gay Games. New blue skies and sporting communities harkened and the FGG awarded Sydney Gay Games VI in the first round of bid-city voting at its 1997 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.
